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Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh recently claimed that President Barack Obama, not the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, canceled the trademark registration of Washington D.C.'s professional football team. Ironically, his claim shows up in today's all-soccer, all-the-time edition of the PolitiFact Oregon Roundup.
(Julie Smith/Associated Press)

The World Cup is in full swing, which means PolitiFact Oregon is pretty much running on one cylinder.

How bad are things? When a colleague said "good morning" yesterday, the entire PolitiFact Oregon staff flopped to the ground. (The colleague received a red card, for which we're not about to apologize.)

So it only seems appropriate that a World Cup-related claim lead off today's roundup. Sprinkle in Hillary Clinton, Paul Ryan and Rush Limbaugh and you're looking at a starting front you don't even want to dream about tackling.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., recently took to Twitter to address immigration reform. Her tweet was accompanied by a photograph of the U.S. Men's National Soccer Team. Omitted were the faces of 11 players. That's how many immigrants play on the team, the tweet indicated.

PolitiFact National's check showed that none of the 11 players in question are immigrants. Some aren't even the children of immigrants. Pelosi's claim was called a handball, which is to say it was rated False.

Hillary Clinton, in her recently published memoir Hard Choices, argues that, "by 2006, the American people were overwhelmingly against the Iraq war."

Since military conflicts are once again flaring in Iraq, PolitiFact checked her claim. Polls at that time showed that about 65 percent of the U.S. public opposed the war by the second half of 2006. But whether that was enough to constitute "overwhelming" opposition was open to question. Clinton was allowed to play on with a Mostly True ruling.

Fox News host Jeanine Pirro, in tying President Barack Obama to the current Sunni uprising in Iraq, said, "The head of this band of savages is a man named Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, the new Osama Bin Laden." Obama released him in 2009, she claimed, one year before he founded the current Islamist military movement.

PunditFact, noting several caveats, wrote, "...the legal contract between the United States and Iraq that guaranteed that the United States would give up custody of virtually every detainee was signed during the Bush administration." The claim, deemed off-side, was rated False.

U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., recently argued in favor of a U.S. military build-up. But he also called on U.S. allies to step up their own efforts, arguing that only three of NATO's 28 members – Britain, Greece and the U.S. – meet their pledge of directing at least 2 percent of their economies to defense spending.

PolitiFact Wisconsin's check found that he neglected to count a fourth member, Estonia. "But that oversight doesn't negate his larger point," the story said, "which is that few NATO countries meet the 2 percent benchmark." The claim contacted the ball well before digging deep into the opposing player's shin, giving it a Mostly True.

Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh jumped into the fray after the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office canceled the trademark registration of the Washington Redskins football team because it disparages American Indians. Limbaugh sought to place the blame elsewhere in saying, "This is not the Patent and Trademark Office. This is Barack Obama."

PunditFact found that the court involved issued the same decision in 1999. "This time," it added, "the two judges who found the trademarks disparaging were appointed in the Bush years." Limbaugh's claim was rated a head-buttingly False.

Have we exhausted our soccer references? Don't count on it. We have players warming up on the sidelines, all ready to get their kick on. Thoughts on the roundup? Leave 'em here.